Shower Could this heat wipe me away from yellow tiles and parquet floors and doors I struggle to keep closed? Could I be swept away entirely? I watch water form rivers down my belly, electric red streaks. I stand strong under the barrage, let the mounting pressure...

Leolyn’s Diary – Words after the diary of Leolyn Spelman, Johns Hopkins University Library. San Gimignano. Found it enchanting. The war has been hard on it: lonely and poverty-stricken and unspoiled. We take our work up to the fortress and sit in the shade...

Today’s poem is brought to you by my younger self who was already wildly disillusioned with men, and by Sir Thomas Wyatt. Hunted after Wyatt You’re not the first to try his hand in my pursuit. Though one came close, outlasted all the rest, even he begged off at...

[Click for other poems published on this blog.] Unbound Your emotional quotient is lacking, you say. (Can’t you see the stale wound, the old nail breeding wicked hemoglobin?) A slightly low white cell count is no cause for alarm. How could I be alarmed at eight a.m.,...

[Click for other poems published on this blog.] Little Girl A little girl sits on the adjacent bus, smudged skin, brown-black eyes, hair just like mine. Her face presses against the grimy glass, she is dreaming of asphodel. I’m staring at myself, and she...

I saw a tweet come across my feed today that Tom Sleigh is doing a reading a bookstore near Harvard. (I live nowhere near Harvard.) I took a poetry workshop with Tom Sleigh a million years ago at Johns Hopkins where I got my master’s in creative writing. He was...